Edited in December 9, 2009. This post was a call for wrestling poems. It was posted July 13, 2009. Four and a half months later, on November 29, 2009, the collection of 52 poems that came from this call was posted:

This Wrestling Poetry Project is intended to foster poetry that is about or related to the sport of amateur wrestling. This can mean our ancient idea of wrestling, which was a sport in the original Olympics, or the current sport, which has essentially three major styles here in the US: (1) the American folkstyle (a.k.a. collegiate style) which is what we have in the high schools and colleges of the USA; (2) freestyle, which is a modern Olympic sport, and (3) the upper-body-oriented Greco-Roman style, also an Olympic sport, which significantly does not include leg holds. There is also Sumo wrestling, and martial arts grappling, and many others around the world. Some of these can be found at the Wikipedia site: Wrestling, which is where the photos came from for this post.

For the Wrestling Poetry Project, the poetry you write may also be about what happens between siblings, and may include parents as family time gets rambunctious in the parlor. It may also be about wrestling with ideas, or non-human beings, or something otherworldly or what have you, for instance Jacob’s wrestling match in Genesis 32:24-32 and David Hernandez’ “Proof”, a poem in which a bear is wrestled. What I don’t mean is the professional wrestling of the WWE or what Hulk Hogan and Randy “Macho Man” Savage would practice, with flying elbows off the top rope and tomahawk chops and whatnot.

Write a good wrestling poem, and submit it to be part of a collection of poems to be posted on Clattery Machinery on Poetry this coming November, near when wrestling season begins. This way, the collection will be available for reading by all the athletes and their friends and fans, when the online search for poetry on wrestling will once again intensify. I know it does because in 2006, when wrestling season was beginning, I made a post called Wrestling With Poetry in November, to alert readers that I would be turning my energies and focus from my frequent poetry blogging, to spend time as a moderator at MassWrestling.com. That post gets Google searched for “wrestling poetry”. There is demand for poems about wrestling, but scant supply.

Submissions will only be accepted in the submission thread at Babilu: Babilu: Wrestling Poetry Project Submission Area. To post a poem there, you will first need to be registered at Babilu. You can do that here: Register here. Babilu also has a workshop area, wherein you can post your wrestling poems for constructive feedback here: Wrestling Poetry Workshop–and please read the Read-Me. You don’t have to workshop the poem at Babilu or anywhere else. Or, you may workshop the poem elsewhere only, or at Babilu and elsewhere, and then post it in the submission area when you sense the poem is complete and ready. But, no e-mail submissions, and no private message submissions, please. This is a community project, such that we all participate and can see the collection forming as we get closer to the beginning of wrestling season.

You may submit your own work, or you may know of an old poem that is out of copyright, or maybe one that you didn’t write but you have the copyrights to. These are all welcome and wanted. You may also submit artwork that is easily posted between the poems. For instance, here is a collection of Banjo Paterson poems at Clattery MacHinery on Poetry, with pictures in between the poems: The Top 20 Greatest Banjo Paterson Poems of All Time. The number of art pieces that is acceptable depends, then, on the number of poems. We cannot have 300 pieces of artwork, if there are 3 poems. The reverse, however, can be true. And if there is only one poem, then I go with it. If we have one thousand, I’ll find a way to do that too.

Which brings up the copyright issue. These poems are to be freely shared by those who would enjoy them, for people to feel free to copy them, speak them and share them any which way. But if we poets and wrestler-poets are to give up our work for no money, it does not seem fair that someone else can use the same work for commercial purposes. Therefore, part of submitting a poem to the Wrestling Poetry Project, is that it shall come under Creative Commons–Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. This way too, as a poem gets shared, the poet’s name remains attached, so you should continue to get credit for your work.

Poems that have previously been published elsewhere are acceptable, indeed welcome, as submissions into this project. Furthermore, you can write a fresh poem, even workshop it in Babilu’s Wrestling Poetry Workshop, but get it published elsewhere first, before November that is. This also means publishers and editors are more than welcome to join the workshop conversation and solicit the poets for their poems, to get them into other publications–even those editors and publishers who would be putting their own anthologies together, all-sports anthologies, smaller wrestling anthologies, any anthologies. None of this is antithetical to or competes with the vision of this project. On the contrary, all these activities get more wrestling poems out there via different channels. Any such work that has been published elsewhere first, will be given such credit in a line following the poem’s presentation at Clattery Machinery on Poetry.

On real names and pen names. You may workshop your poetry and give feedback to others with an online name, if this helps you to be creative, if it’s more fun for you, or makes you more comfortable. When November comes around, you can then switch to your real name, so that you receive credit for your work as you are known. The reverse is also acceptable. You may want to be around other poets using your real name, but prefer to publish with a pseudonym. However you do it, I will link to a web page you are associated with, for when readers click on your name, which will appear just before your poem. You might want this web page to contain your contact information.

There is the special case of wrestlers and former wrestlers writing wrestling poems. When this happens, I would like to give the wrestling credit–whether it be a high school, college, or a particular championship or accomplishment–before the poem’s title following the name, like so:

by John Doe
Western College State University, 1973-76, 165 lb

Who is invited to submit? Anyone who can write a good wrestling poem. This project is being announced at Clattery Machinery on Poetry and Babilu, but also many online poetry workshops, such as can be found at 25 Online Poetry Forums and Workshops, and many wrestling forums such as can be found at my post at MassWrestling.com, Amateur Wrestling Forums in the USA, and also at FaceBook.

That’s sums up the guidelines for the Wrestling Poetry Project. Below are two sections that may be useful first to those who want to know a little more about amateur wrestling before getting going with a poem, and another section for those of you who may want to know a little about approaching such a poem, depending on how much wrestling you’ve done or been exposed to. For you who are all set, don’t wait for the whistle, shoot, shoot!.

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Acclimating to Amateur Wrestling

Let’s begin with a collegiate wrestling match, Chad Mendes vs Jeff Jaggers for the 2008 NCAA championship at 141 lbs. I watched Jaggers become the 135-lb high school national champion and the outstanding wrestler at the 2004 NHSCA Senior Nationals in Cleveland Ohio. En route, he had to beat #2 seed Troy Tiparelle of California, who had beaten him earlier that year. So I am invested to a degree in the outcome of this match up. It’s a good one. I select it also because the announcers are clear about what is happening. You can get the gist of what’s happening without being an expert on the rules.

In the third period, there is that injury. Did you notice when Jeff Jaggers had his leg extended, that it looked potentially dangerous? That’s not supposed to happen, but it was in and out so quickly, and in and out again too quickly for the referee to make an assessment to call what was seen in the blink of the eye. Then before you know it, Jaggers is injured. The risk of injury is always there. Everyone who has been around amateur wrestling has injury stories to tell.

Here are some videos in a short series called Folkstyle Wrestling 101, in which the instructor talks over some wrestling situations, talking about take downs, escapes and reversals, the basics:

Significantly, wrestling is a team sport. High School teams field 14 wrestlers each in their 14 weight classes from 103 pounds through 275, and college teams field 10, from 125 pounds through 285. Therefore, it may not be that a given wrestler can beat his or her opponent, if that opponent is a known stud, maybe a regional champion. But the lesser opponent can win the meet for his or her team, if he or she does not get pinned, because a pin gives the opposing team more points than a decision. And the total points determine which team wins in what’s called a dual meet, when one team is against another, or a tournament.

I have been saying, “his or her opponent.” Women wrestle. There is a T-Shirt out there that reads, “Silly boys, wrestling is for girls.” Here is a freestyle wrestling match from the 1998 Pan Am Games, Jenn Ryz of Canada versus Olga Lugo of Venezuela.

I like the match, starting with the knee pick, so for the sake of illustration, the moves and types of moves are here expanded. Wrestlers have many such moves in their bags of tricks.

The Ryz-Lugo match also illustrates scoring differences between freestlyle and folkstyle. And, I confess to favoring folkstyle for the martial arts aspect, even though freestyle affords the wrestlers the chance to display their athletic prowess. For instance, what good does it do as a martial art, to keep turning your opponent over? Folkstyle is more control-oriented. In folkstyle you get back points depending on how long you can keep your opponent’s shoulders close to the mat–on the mat means a pin and you win. By the way, in the martial art called grappling, pinning your opponent does not give you victory, as your opponent can fight off her back.

Here is a highlight video of the Greco-Roman wrestling in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Notice there is no such thing as an ankle pick, as the wrestlers stay clear of the legs. There is also no commentary, which you don’t get if you’re in the crowd. What you see is what you get:

As for highlight videos, here is a freestyle one set to music:

But bear in mind, only once in a while do we get a match worthy of such an action video. Many wrestling matches are low-scoring events, that put the fans of either opponents on the edges of their seats, while nothing significant may seem to be happening for those who are not fans. At tournaments, while you wait, sometimes for hours, for your favorite wrestler to wrestle his or her next match, you occupy yourself, looking at the sometimes dozens of matches going on simultaneously in a large wide-open gymnasium or whatever other facility is available in a given community.

So what is it really like? Here is Victor DeJesus of Lowell High School in Massachusetts wrestling another 145-pounder, Joey Eon of Massabesic High School in Waterboro, Maine. They are wrestling for the 2008-09 New England Championship. It’s folkstyle, where we started. To be invested, pretend one wrestler is your brother, your son, or your teammate, and root for him from the opening whistle:

There is the adage for poets to write what you know, and not what you don’t know. This leaves a lot of latitude, but on the other hand, it means it is going to be difficult to write a poem from the viewpoint of a wrestler if you have never wrestled. Let’s first look at poetry that is outside the realm of having to be a wrestler, or poems that come from outside the realm of having to be even an athlete or fighter of any kind.

It seems that in Genesis where Jacob wrestles with God, or the angel, the scribe did not have to be a wrestler. Although, my hunch is that the writer was at least exposed to wrestling matches. But, whether David Hernandez ever wrestled, his poem “Proof” could have been written by him anyway, or it seems so. And the point here is that your readers can tell.

This brings up the amount of exposure a poet needs to have in order to write from certain points of view–which in turn raises the question of how much of the wrestling perspective can be accomplished by a family member who is the fan and not the fighter, or more importantly, someone who has been en-culturated into the wrestling community. There is a poem with the first line, “My dad was a boxer and all his brothers,” and I believe from my reading that the poet is indeed the daughter of a boxer. In my view, she needed to be in order to write the poem: “Too Hurt Not To”, which is by Naomi Woddis. You decide. And my point here is not so much to limit what you write, but to show how there is much ground for anyone to write from. You can be a family member or a fan, and write a terrific wrestling poem.

Now let’s go to the observer poem. In Kelly Cherry’s “On Watching a Young Man Play Tennis,” we don’t ever have to know whether Cherry ever played tennis, or was even a fan of tennis. However, it seems that she has watched a match or two. By the way, the link to that poem is to the specific place where her poem appears in the anthology of poetry and fiction called Sports in America, edited by Peter Stine. You can read through it for other approaches and inspirations that you may favor. Note that there are no poems or stories in there about wrestling. You might also read Don Johnson’s Introduction in his book The sporting muse.

The most famous poems by fighters are the ones by war poets who were soldiers at war, either when they wrote the poem, or after they were off the battlefield. Here is a famous one by WWI soldier Wilfred Owen:

He gives an eye-witness view that would be difficult to achieve if he had not been there. He was exposed and he in turn is able to expose us to his experience of that war.

Tapping other emotions of wartime, we also have the famous poem, “Here, Bullet”, by Brain Turner, who was in Iraq:

Notice that, for the first half of the poem, you can very nearly replace his word “Bullet” with “Wrestler”. He has been a soldier/fighter, and if he had been a wrestler, he could have begun a poem in a very similar way. This ought to be the same for any athlete. If you have played a sport, especially at the varsity level, there are experiences that you have had that should transfer well, the facts of the athletic event that you can well relate to, and should make your poem come alive on the page for the reader.

I go into some underpinnings of the Brian Turner poem in a post at Clattery Machinery on Poetry called Alley War Poetry. The sport there is boxing, versus wrestling. But it could be worth a look. Other points are made in that article, such as that not all poetry needs to be or ought to be uplifting, nor should it necessarily take the reader into wise places in the cosmos. Poetry can take us to the heights, but also the depths, and then again to the ground where we live, or reveal the edges of it.

You’re a poet or you’d like to be, and you’re at home or maybe work, with your computer. Wouldn’t it be great to write a poem and post it into a forum for others like yourself to read and give feedback on, maybe spiff up some of your work, get it ready to submit somewhere, learn a few things or a few things more, find some creative, inspiring people?

The forum conversations could tend along the lines of the letters between poet Hart Crane and the editor of Poetry, Harriet Monroe. Within the recent article in the New York Review of Books, A Great American Visionary, Colm Tóibín discusses the give and take between Monroe and Crane after he submitted his poem “At Melville’s Tomb” to her. Here is the end of that discussion:

Monroe had commented as well on the opening of the last stanza:

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive No farther tides….

“Nor do compass, quadrant and sextant,” she wrote, “contrive tides, they merely record them, I believe.”

“Hasn’t it often occurred,” Crane replied,

that instruments originally invented for record and computation have inadvertently so extended the concepts of the entity they were invented to measure (concepts of space, etc.) in the mind and imagination that employed them, that they may metaphorically be said to have extended the original boundaries of the entity measured?

In the same letter, he quoted from Blake and T.S. Eliot to show how the language of the poetry he wrote and admired did not simply ignore logic, it sought to find a logic deeply embedded in metaphor and suggestion.

Wouldn’t it be great to be a modern-day Hart Crane and find a Harriet Monroe to discuss such matters of creativity with? To this end, there is an article here at Clattery MacHinery on Poetry called 25 Online Poetry Forums and Workshops where you can click and explore select poetry forums. To this same end, you could explore “The IBPC Boards” on the sidebar of The InterBoard Poetry Community web site to see where you might belong and how the conversations tend. What a perfect place, the internet, where from the comfort of your own home, from wherever the creative urge strikes, you may share your poetry, and enter discussions on poetry with like-minded people. Maybe, however, you cannot, or it is just not that easy. Maybe there are community tendencies or social constrictions that would discourage you, and you would give up on this idea. Maybe on line poetry has grown so large, that it is time for it to look at itself, like any legitimate field must.

Everything written below is by Terreson.

–Clattery MacHinery on Poetry

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Dear Reader,

Are poetry boards good for poetry?

I wonder if anyone else has wondered about something: are online poetry boards good for poetry? A subset of questions might run something like this. Do the boards benefit poets, the new and inexperienced especially who, in most cases, are grappling with the vital stuff of finding an authentic voice, gaining confidence in themselves, working through the canon, trying to figure out if they have something essential to say, and all at the same time? Do the boards, viewed as communities, engender poetry whose language is also authentic or do they falsify the poetry experience? Another question comes to mind. Is even the notion of an online poetry community good for poetry? And maybe one last question. What impact on poets, and on poetry itself, do the parameters, the rules of conduct and the by-laws, of many boards have?

I think it possible that the poetry board experience falsifies poetry and renders it inauthentic, which is a peculiar thing to have to say about online sites many poets, new and experienced, flock to both in order to improve their skills and to find like-minded people who are devoted to the art in the first place. In the history of poetry, and with rare exception, no such community of poets and their critics has ever produced first-rate poems. To the extent poetry is a community it is more like an unendowed college, with each collegian operating in tandem and usually alone. Simply put poetry has always had the features of a cottage industry standing outside notions of community. A notable exception might be Mallarme’s famous Tuesday nights in Paris when fellow Symbolists gathered at his home to read their poems to each other. Even here, however, I am not aware that those poets engaged in analysis, criticism, parsing and such. Certainly they were motivated to create a, then, radically new aesthetic, a defined program in which they each had a vital interest. But whether or not community, in and of itself, is beneficial or harmful to poetry is a larger question, looking almost existential actually, and best left to individual poets to sort through. The smaller, more manageable question might again be this: generally speaking, are public poetry boards operationally designed in such a way that they kill the art by falsifying the experience or do they benefit the art?

Here is some of what I’ve come to suspect, and drawing on nearly ten years of participating in various online poetry communities, both on the boards and in the chat rooms.

Terreson

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The Pee in the Pool of On Line Poetry: Are poetry boards good for poetry?

Notions of Community.

Boards and rooms tend to place first emphasis on community cohesion, with poetry, poetry-related conversation, and the free exchange of ideas viewed as secondary. It is interesting to view a poem allowed in the name of free speech that expresses violence, threats of violence, bigotry, and sexism. Then to notice how the exchange of views in heated debate is closely monitored by moderators, often admonished, sometimes deleted from a forum as inflammatory. The contradiction is interesting. What it signifies is that a particular board’s community cohesion, and its culture, is an animal in its own right and takes precedence over the artistic project(s). The mantra frequently expressed is: ’be nice.’ The suspicion, however, is that what actually matters, and in top down fashion, is the board’s culture and not the poetry or the exchange over ideas concerning poetry. So the question becomes: does such a culture falsify the poetry experience? Does it tell the online poet, say, that parenthetical bitch language in a poem is okay, whereas honesty in critical discussion is not? My sense is that the free exchange of ideas is viewed as dangerous to community, but that poetry is not, since, it honestly doesn’t matter.

Poet/Critic Dialogue.

Rarely, if ever, is the meaningful dialogue allowed between the posting poet and the posting critic. Board guidelines tend to explicitly discourage the exchange. Poets are even told to thank the critic no matter what has been offered in the way of critical response. The password defining the parameters of the poet to critic relationship is “don’t crit the critter.” It is a rule, an effective gag order, that causes the head to wag and wobble, and one again I believe designed more for the sake of community cohesion than for the sake of the poet and poetry. The unfortunate consequence is that poet is put at the disadvantage, while critic is allowed to say practically anything with impunity, no matter how uncomprehending, or even biased.

Common sense suggests that the critic is no more likely to know the nature of good poetry than is the poet. I know of no case in the history of literary criticism where a school of thought has not been superseded eventually by another or taken to task for what it failed to understand. And the suspicion becomes twofold: comments on a poem are often made only to satisfy a required number of commentaries in order to get a poem posted, and critics can, often do, comment in a compensatory, self-serving fashion, or with a bias that frequently disenables their perspective. Add to this the extent to which online critics often do not bother to ground themselves in both the canon of poetry and critical theory, and, again, question of motivation comes into play.

Why then should a commentator be given a license the posting poet is not allowed? It was Auden who divided the world into two camps. The prolific and the devourer. In the first camp he put poets along with farmers. In the second he put professional critics along with politicians. This rather begs the further question: if poetry boards sanction the frequently inept critic for whom are the boards meant? Are poets, the bread and butter of poetry boards, also its fodder? If so, here again there appears to be a falsification of the poetry experience online that is not healthy, especially for the new poet.

Poetry Board as Workshop.

Then there is the proposition that poetry boards are intended to function as workshops. I am satisfied that, by and large, the public boards fail in this function. First, emphasis is placed on production and not on refinement. Here too the system of criticism contributes by its own lack of authenticity, by its lack of in-depth reading, and by its lack of sincerity. And, secondly, the sheer size of many boards is neither conducive to meaningful exchange nor to the kind of developed relationships between poets that can best benefit artistic growth. Having been a member of a small, private board for nearly two years where the members have had the chance to follow each other’s progress and where, because of the shared history, each other’s poetry is followed, commented on, entered into with greater comprehension, I am convinced of the failure of the larger boards to function as workshops in a meaningful sense of the office.

The Insincere Reader.

Participating members can also contribute to the falsifying of poetry. While I’ve met many poets, new and old, clearly devoted to the discipline for its own sake, and who have both the instinct and the hunger for authentic poetry, two contrary salients stand out. First, there are the scores of posted responses to poems entirely lacking in sincerity. They tend to be complimentary and generic. Recently I was reminded how Donald Hall once decried America’s growing number of “McPoets,” products of false praise and encouragement without the supporting evidence of talent and ability. If poetry is to be taken seriously the inflationary effect of the unwarranted compliment becomes a serious problem.

Anti-intellectual Element.

Then there is the anti-intellectual element on poetry boards. If, as Yeats thought, poetry is to speak to the whole body and to the whole of the human experience, then it must speak to the whole soma, to the senses, to the ear, to the groin as much as to the head. In brief: poetry must be as much a felt experience as the felt experience thought about. And yet there are those, none too few, who would disallow from the boards exchanges in poetics, prosody, and critical thinking. This is not a good sign. It does not bode well for poetry.

Interboard Understanding.

There also seems to be a collusion between public poetry boards that speaks to something resembling a backroom politicians’ understanding. On many boards, at least, members are not allowed to raise questions about other boards and, by extension, about the design and the parameters of the online poetry board system in general. Again, the head is made to wag and wobble. The circumstance speaks to a cartel of shared interests among board administrators. It too suggests a culture that has less to do with poets and poetry and more to do with safe-guarding its own green zone, what again must end up falsifying the poetry experience on line.

If poets are discouraged from raising questions and challenging precepts in their own community how then can they be expected to see to one of poetry’s cardinal responsibilities, that of breaking taboo and challenging clichés in behavior, perception, and language? Viewed from a certain standpoint, vital poetry keeps as a danger to the community, be the township bureaucratic, corporate, or domestic. And I am persuaded that as much is expected of poetry by the many townships. So what is to be made of a circumstance in which poetry’s own township displays the bunker mentality?

Board Administrations.

I’ve saved the most serious question for last: does the poetry board infrastructure of moderators and site administrators benefit the poet and create a free range environment encouraging poetry? Closest to the point, does it actually engender the community the system is designed to keep in place? Here my question is rhetorical as I am persuaded the answer is no. I have spent some few years as both a board moderator and as a poetry chat room host. I am settled in the opinion that the greatest danger to poetry on line is the governing system of board moderators and site administrators, which system proves the Orwellian insight. All animals are created equal, some more than others. An insight that cannot be more abhorrent to artists in general, poets in particular, whose vocation requires they be slightly anarchistic, certainly free wheeling and passionate in their convictions, if they are to keep creative in their artistic personalities.

I’ve heard all the arguments for the necessity of the governance, which is what it is. The salient of which might be that the system safeguards public poetry boards from so-called trollers. The history of the system suggests that the abuses meted out by moderators and site administrators with the tools to delete posts and ban members rather outweigh the safeguards. A poetry board’s rules and by-laws is often a matter of subjective interpretation, something that fundamentally comes into play.

On a member’s side of the divide, it is clear that moderators are allowed more liberties than they are. And among members it is generally recognized that a moderator’s own poem should not be taken too closely to account, that a deferential comment, even if falsely given, is best. (And I guess I must wonder how the circumstance affects the inexperienced poet who perhaps notices the insincere comment on a moderator‘s poem, often praising it without warrant.) It is also clear that to question a moderator brings down on the member the approbation of other staff moderators, that to criticize a moderator’s poem can result in the same. When this happens there is an unmistakable closing-of-ranks, and the divide that all too many members know becomes sharper, more well defined, and sends out a certain other, Orwellian message. Of all the online poetry board features, the politics infused into the environment by the two-tiered system of moderators/site administrators and members may just be the most pernicious, may be what falsifies the online poetry experience the most, at least when the experience is viewed as an artistic project.

The on line poetry experience is not limited to the posting, public airing of a poem. Nor is it limited to the poet/critic exchange. To say it again, at its best it is a free range environment, call it a Montessori school yard. As the system stands I think it possible it is not just a failure, but a betrayal of the instinct for poetry. Back in 1991 Robert Bly put together a collection of essays on American poetry: “American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity.” The collection includes an interview with Bly, conducted by Wayne Dodd. From the interview:

“Dodd: ‘It may also be that poets will be afraid to risk doing the really different thing, that might seem to be profoundly true to them nonetheless, for fear of being accused of peeing on the floor.’

Bly: ‘Oh, indeed! That’s right! I’m sure that the reviewers of Pound’s early work, which had a lot of freaky originality, accused him constantly of being poorly house-trained. What would originality look like today? . . . It’s possible that originality comes when the man or woman disobeys the collective. The cause of tameness is fear. The collective says: “If you do your training well and become a nice boy or girl we will love you.” We want that. So a terrible fear comes. It is a fear that we will lose the love of the collective. I have felt that intensely. What the collective offers is not even love, that is what is so horrible, but a kind of absence of loneliness. Its companionship is ambiguous, like mother love.’”

In my view the collective Bly speaks of and the poetry board culture I draw attention to, at least as it perpetuates itself with an eye to its own maintenance, bear a certain family resemblance.

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Terreson is an itinerant poet, sometime novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist. Originally from Florida he presently lives in Louisiana where he assists in research into honey bee genomics. He welcomes your comments at terecone {at} aol {dot} com.